LBJ’s poignant paradoxes

The celebration of LBJ's achievement comes so late that few contemporaries remain. | AP Photo

For his part, Young asked, “Where’s the movement now?” before answering himself by saying, “I don’t know, but it’s probably on somebody’s iPhone,” a reference to the protests of the Arab Spring.

(Disclosure: This reporter moderated a Wednesday panel on the relationship between Johnson and Martin Luther King featuring Young, White House adviser Joseph Califano, and historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Taylor Branch.)

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For much of his career in Congress, Johnson was ambivalent about civil rights, but in 1957, as Senate majority leader, he worked to pass the first such bill since Reconstruction, albeit one that he so watered down as to render it largely symbolic. But as vice president, his convictions hardened that the issue had to be addressed if the country had any hope of living up to its founding creed, and in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he embraced the comprehensive bill that Kennedy had proposed in 1963 with every ounce of his famous drive.

Johnson’s unwavering commitment to pass the strongest possible bill — weakened by none of the famous Johnson wheeling-and-dealing — was a crucial factor in the law’s ultimate passage on July 2, 1964. But just as vital — and much less well remembered — was the patient work of the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Mike Mansfield, and his field general, Hubert Humphrey in letting the bill’s Southern opponents exhaust themselves in a filibuster of nearly three months while they courted support from the wily Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, and his fellow Midwestern conservatives.

Johnson himself wanted to keep the Senate in round-the-clock sessions in an effort to jam the bill through, but Humphrey believed that would backfire. Humphrey’s chief legislative lieutenant, John Stewart, among those not here this week, noted in a recent monograph on the bill, “Fairness and openness for all sides was a reality. Proponents and opponents had the opportunity to make their case.”

Robert Kimball, in 1964 a young legislative aide to Rep. John Lindsay (R-N.Y.) and now by a quirk of career the leading historian of the American musical theater, was on hand at the conference, bearing witness to the crucial role Republicans played in passing the bill with overwhelming support in both houses — a point that Speaker John Boehner also made in a letter to conference organizers this week.

But today’s GOP is vastly different than that of Lindsay and Dirksen (R-Ill.), the Senate Republican leader whose ultimate support for the bill broke the filibuster. Obama often chafes at the exhortations — some of them from former Johnson aides like Califano — that he should take a page from LBJ’s legislative playbook and work harder to woo an admittedly hostile Congress. Historians Branch and Goodwin acknowledged that Obama faces vastly different political realities than Johnson did a half century ago — when huge Democratic majorities and a more collegial climate prevailed in Washington. “To change the mood of the country from cynicism to optimism is not something that is wholly in the purview of the presidency,” Branch said. But he added that he believed the president still had an opportunity to address enduring questions of race more forthrightly.

Johnson’s last public appearance, in December 1972, was on the same stage at his library on the University of Texas campus where this week’s conference was held, and marked the opening of some of his White House files on civil rights. He suffered a visibly agonizing attack of angina, then quietly popped a nitroglycerin pill for the pain.

“Whites stand on history’s mountain, and blacks stand in history’s hollow,” Johnson said then. The challenge, he concluded, was to “get down to the business of trying to stand black and white on level ground.”

Barely a month later, Johnson was dead, of a heart attack at his ranch. But this week’s conference participants made it clear that the challenge LBJ outlined remains very much alive today.